2D – Having been the one to point this out to GoMo News their response was excellent and quickly highlighted the point I’d made and then took the initiative to ‘survey’ their readers on whether they knew the difference or not.

The findings indicated that most people don’t know the difference – and for consumers, it doesn’t really matter – as long as the leading ‘code reader’ suppliers are enabling QR & DM to e read (which the sensible ones are.)

However, for the companies, govt.’s and media groups that are now moving into the use of Mobile + 2D, then it makes a notable difference… and if they don’t know the difference, then they may not be spending their money so wisely.

Are you really surprised? GomoNews, in my opinion, is often publishing dubious technical information. I have to really question the competency of Bena Roberts as a technical reporter.

Someone called her on the comment that Datamatrix codes are more secure and the response she gave was – “I have heard this argument several times. The smaller code is more robust and the Japanese code not so as crime is not such an issue in Japan. This view has been touted to me by several industry leaders since 2007.”

Huh? Touted to her? She calls herself a journalist, but does no research into if what’s being touted to her is even remotely true.

Now how you decides to treat those bits is entirely up to you. But neither code is more or less secure.

My second point is regarding her Japanese characters comment. The QR code was developed in Japan and can compress both Japanese characters and uppercase ASCII characters efficiently. But since we are still dealing with bits here, both DataMatrix and QR codes can encode any variety of UTF-8 character. Chinese, greek, Cyrillic, you name it.

On the plus side, I was able to tell the difference in design between the two. Unfortunately, the downside is that I can not tell you when or why you should use QR instead of Data Matrix. I’d greatly appreciate knowing why I’d choose QR instead of DM. The only advaqntage that I’ve found so far is that QR handles Japanese characters and seems to accept more characters (over 7,ooo numeric if I’m not mistaken). But if all I need to do is go to a link, why not just use DataMatrix? Anyone?